Sunday, June 12, 2016

Get all the free books

Recently, there has been some controversy over a person who asked for
"free" books. You can read all about it here.
I won't repeat it because this is not the point of my post.

The
point of my post? If you have a low income and do not have a lot of
expendable income to spend on entertainment, and you like to read,
consider all the legitimate
free book sources that are available. Sign up for services that tell
you about free books in the genre you are interested in, there are tons
of them out there. They will send you frequent emails letting you know
when the books in the genres you've selected are free, 99c or on sale.

As of June 1st, 2016, there are approximately 85,502
FREE books in the Amazon Kindle store.
You see that? Over 85K+ of free books! At my average reading speed of
approximately 160 books read a year, it will take me 531 years to read
them all. Dang! I don't even live that long!!!

So
you argue, well, I won't read all 85K+ of those books because they are
not in the genre I read. Say you're like me and you ONLY read romance.
Well, I did a search in the Amazon Kindle store for "free romance books in kindle
store". Know how many books came up? 14,284. Yes, that's
right. Over 14K+ free
romance books,
in just about EVERY sub-genre of romance there is. That is going to
take me about 89 years to read is the number stays exactly the same
(but it's always growing!) and I live to a hundred! Who even knows if
I'll be able to continue to read when I'm 90?

You see what I'm getting at here?

And
if you're going to say "but the free books are rubbish!" I'd like to
point out a lot of reputable authors list some of their books for free
in order to introduce you to their work. Two of my favorites are Elaine Levine and Cristin Harber. They
have the first books in their series for free. Some others include Evangeline Anderson,
Katrina Abbott,
Regina Scott and April
Kihlstrom, and Athena
Grayson.
Haven't heard of these authors before? Why not give them a shot? The
books are free! You haven't lost anything but some of your time to try
them out. Move on to the next free book if you didn't like the last
one.

Say
you wanted to pay for specific books you wanted to read and didn't want
to pay a lot of money. How about the books what are between 1c and
$2.98? I'm not even counting the $2.99 books, which are plentiful and
very inexpensive.

Approximately 20.9%
of the Amazon Kindle store consists of books between 1c and
$2.98! That's 947,387
of 4,535,673 books!
947K+ books. Do you want to know how long it will take to read all
those books at my reading average? 5,921 years!!! That's older than
Methusaleh! Methusaleh only lived for 969 years and he's considered
(according to the Bible) the oldest man who ever lived! Hey, we're not
counting vampires and other fictional immortal beings here! :-p

So
far I've only focused on what's available in the Amazon Kindle store
because that's my eBook retailer of choice, plus they also have the
largest online selection of eBooks available to purchase. At the latest
count, as of June 1st, 2016, there are approximately 4,535,673
books in the Kindle store. That's 4.53M+ books!! There's
something for everyone!

In addition to Amazon Kindle, there's also iBooks,
Kobo, Barnes
and Noble and Google
Play Books. If you're looking for something romance specific,
there's also All
Romance eBooks, and of course, Smashwords.
There's something for just about any of your eReader / device of
choice. Subscribe to their newsletters and you'll get notified of sales
and free books whenever they are available. You can even select the
genre you prefer. Trust me when I say, all these places want you to
sign up for their newsletter!!

Other alternatives are free book newsletter subscription services like eReaderIQ
where you can load your Amazon wish list and they will send you an
email notification each time the book drops in price or is free. Or Bookbub.
They have an email service which sends out an email once a week of free
books in the genre of your choice. Ebook Discovery
is another one. There are many others, of course,
these are only a few of the more prominent ones. Sign up for all their
newsletters. Soon you will have more free books to read than you have
time to read them all.

Finally,
if you're on Facebook or Twitter, like or follow your favorite authors.
They are all very nice people. They often post promotions when their
books are on sale or free. This happens frequently.

I
promise
you, if you do these things, you will have no shortage of reading
material, more often than not free or as low as 99c. It's not a lot to
pay for a book, for several hours of entertainment. It's less than a
cup of coffee!! Authors put in a lot of effort to create these products
for us to enjoy. I saw in passing on author claim a book takes her
about 5,024 hours to write and produce. When they only charge 99c or
$2.99 per book, it's not much, especially when you do the math and work
out how many books they have to sell only to make back their initial
investment, let alone start making money! Feed the authors so they can
keep producing rockin' books for you to read. Buy their books! Leave a
review!

And
guess what? I haven't even mentioned your local library. Go join a
library or two in the town you live in and surrounding you. They don't
charge you anything to borrow their books to read and they always have
new books coming into the library. You can even request books you'd
like if you don't see them on their catalog. What about audiobooks?
They have those too.

See? Plenty of options. Don't be naughty. Get your reading fix of free
to very inexpensive books from legitimate sources.

ps.
In researching the internet for this blog post, I picked up a whole
bunch of free books from Amazon because I cannot help the one-click! :-)

UPDATE:
Amazon has recently included a new feature with their email
subscriptions service where they email you when there is a price drop
for a book in your Amazon Wish List. It's similar to the eReaderIQ
service but within Amazon itself. It's a nice feature. It prompted me
to purchase a book I had on my wish list when I got the email.

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About Me

I love all things beauty and makeup, reading and books, and also have a keen interest in cooking and food. Combined with a husband who loves wine, we write a number of blogs that align with our interests. I have two blogs: Deanna's World which focuses on all things books and beauty, and Daz In The Kitchen which is my cooking and food blog. I hope you visit and stay around.

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